> As long as companies are driven by profits Capital really doesn't drive innovation at all except in very specific situations where there are sufficient regul

> As long as companies are driven by profits Capital really doesn't drive innovation at all except in very specific situations where there are sufficient regulations and guardrails to coax companies in the direction of progress (and you certainly won't see innovation happening under completely unregulated capitalism). It's almost always independent and/or individual people -- researchers, open source contributors, scientists, etc -- who come up with society-changing technologies and ideas. In the mid 1900s, the large tech corporations ran enormous corporate laboratories, like the famous Bell Labs that would churn out things like this (Unix, almost the internet, etc). Rampant de-regulation of capital in the 70s and 80s led to an industry shift that removed these guardrails and incentives and made it easier to simply monopolize, price fix, and acquire your way to the top, as the oil and rail tycoons had in the early 1900s, and that is where we find ourselves now. FANG companies are not innovators -- they have become machines that swallow up the innovations of others and either neutralize or begrudgingly copy them in such a way that still manages to crush competition via economies of scale. Google, the "great innovator" of search hasn't innovated on the topic of search engines in over a decade, and instead relies on multi-billion dollar deals to ensure Google is the default search engine on every mobile device in the world. When a competitor emerges, they acquire and shutter it, or sit pretty knowing economies of scale will ensure new competitors won't get sufficient traction. For the last decade, Apple has simply watched the tech industry very closely, cultivated their image as a glorified fashion company (everything driven by design and status-symbol imagery), exerted monopolistic control over an entire industry via their app store fees and tight restrictions, and used their unlimited resources to copy or buy their way into the features and ideas actual innovators have proven will play well in the coming years. Amazon uses its size and its control over a global marketplace (that they completely control) to continuously enter new markets and shutter competition with economies of scale, and is taking the same approach with AWS. Notably they won't be innovating on anything outside the realm of "just run it in our network of data centers", and everything they do with AWS is designed to pull you into the walled garden of AWS products. Netflix has simply acquired their way into controlling a large portion of the good movie studios, their only "innovation" being on perpetuating a toxic and cutthroat company culture where everyone is constantly under review and DRM and compression technology to limit who can watch what based on expensive regional licensing deals. All of these companies are threatened by, and afraid of innovation, and they will stop it from happening if they can. They compete and innovate, only if they have to, and would much rather just pay you to not innovate. Capital isn't going to create innovation -- regulation of capital, done correctly, will. Capital has to be dragged into innovating, kicking and screaming.